Assessment of brain ventricular volumes from MRI images

This paper considers the problem of assessment of brain ventricular volumes from 3D MRI brain scans. It is an important problem because the enlargement of brain ventricles is a pathological condition which accompanies some brain diseases. However, the existing techniques of ventricular volumes measurement are still mainly manual or semi-manual. Therefore, this paper introduces methods for segmentation of the brain ventricular system and separation of the ventricles. In particular, the interactive segmentation approach based on the random walker segmentation algorithm is proposed. The introduced method firstly extracts the entire ventricular system of brain. Next, it separates the ventricles from each other. Finally, the method of assessment of ventricles volume is introduced. The results of applying the proposed approach to Brain Web MRI brain phantoms are presented and discussed. Both the visual and the numerical results compared to the anatomical data suggest the correctness of the introduced approach.